Lots of comments observing that the cry of "socialism" goes back at least to the New Deal. But it, and what's now the standard litany of scaremongering from the right goes back way, way further than that. Let's take a snapshot from the 1850s. 1/ https://twitter.com/NikkiHaley/status/1343607059569401856

“The Great Republican Reform Party” was a lithograph from the 1856 presidential campaign, used to bash the first Republican candidate, John Fremont, and by extension, the entire Republican Party. 2/

The Republicans were then considered by their opponents to be “radicals” (which speaks to some of the deep roots of the “party switch” of the 20th century, but that’s a separate story). 3/

So what exactly were the Republicans supposedly going to usher in to the US if Fremont got elected? Let’s move left to right. 4/

First, a temperance advocate and vegetarian, who wants to make using tobacco, eating meat, and drinking beer a “capital crime.” It’s a short step from here to ranting about any kind of nutrition campaign, or the left wanting to ban hamburgers via the Green New Deal. 5/

Next, a women’s rights campaigner, who wants women to be the equals of men and to have the right to vote and hold office. Smoking and wearing a bloomer outfit that included pants, she’s the cousin of the modern “radical feminist.” 6/

To her right is your “socialist,” who wants “an equal division of Property.” Unshaven and disheveled, he’s the 1850s version of the folks who supposedly want “handouts” and to take what they haven’t “earned.” 7/

After him comes an advocate of “Free Love,” who wants to shed “the shackles of marriage.” Pretty easy to see how she morphs into any one of the modern phantasms that want to “destroy the traditional family.” 8/

Then we get a Catholic priest, who wants Fremont “to place the power of the Pope on a firm footing in this country.” Catholicism’s place in the US has changed a lot since the 1850s, but if you’ve heard about the imagined threat of “Sharia law,” then you get the idea. 9/

Finally, we have a racist caricature of a Black man advocating not only abolition but seeking an assurance that Black people will “come in first.” Here we have the idea that demands for racial equality are actually demands for racial preference. 10/

And Fremont welcomes them all. “You shall all have what you desire,” he says, “If I get into the Presidential Chair.” 11/

Republicans may be the ones trotting out the cliched fears today, but the fears themselves—that the left will turn everything upside down along lines of race, class, gender, and religion, and that they will tell you how to live your life—are more than 150 years old. 12/12